thestage

You know, I just quoted that post to say the same thing before I noticed yours. So different and so alike, donthate. I think I've been called a "severely unbalanced cynical shell" since I was about eleven years old.

You got in-person interviews. Schools don't just bring people in like that for fun. There's no guarantee you're in, of course, but you are at the least very close, which should give you good prospects for whatever schools you haven't heard back from yet.

one could find heaps of them who take a great many days off

he did indeed proclaim it, and he was right to do so. I don't have any of the energy required to defend or explicate Gravity's Rainbow. it is in many obvious ways a profoundly different experience from Moby Dick or Absalom, Absalom!, which are novels that appear to me to have a great affinity for one another, but I would still feel comfortable placing it in that continuum. if nothing else, the colossal weight of its prose demands that you ask the question. the scope of its history certainly shares something with Faulkner, and I think maybe it's all-encompassing nature calls to Moby Dick, even if this is very much a book of an era which had rebuked all metaphysics. and, of course of course, this book is to rocketry and polymers (as well as countless other things, in what passes in this book for moderation) what Moby Dick is to whaling, though it will dare you, mockingly and pointedly, to find a trace of the former's holistic circular force in its titular parabola. it has become a bit of a trend to declare otherwise, given our shifting literary tastes and values, but it must also be said that Gravity's Rainbow is a phenomenally difficult read. it would be pointless to go into it without a good sense of that fact.

but how do you, like, figure out where to click and so forth also if I were blind I would never, ever correct a typo or misspelling. so you're either not me or you're an impeccable typist. I think about blindness because reading and writing are too important to me. also my grandfather is blind. I hate audio books so I'd probably be fucked. how do computer voices parse misspellings, terrible grammar, etc. (i.e., the internet)? also, for your creepy computer voice: help me, I am trapped in this computer. I just want to be a real boy and/or girl.

Gravity's Rainbow is the best american novel since Absalom, Absalom! I'm not qualified to say this.

how does the internet work. I'm not being glib, twitchy downvoters.

You can have application fees waived at most Universities if you provide some reasonable evidence of financial hardship. I would find it hard to believe that you would be denied a waiver at any school.

well that's a new one

most people who get in to one place get in to several, that's how it works. if your profile looks good to one group of English professors, it's probably going to look good to another group of English professors just the same. it is when these people then bitch about not getting in to even more schools, which is nearly as inevitable as their acceptances were to begin with, that we have grounds for whatever negative emotion you would like grounds for.

they have most certainly made rejections. believe me, I know all about it.

Check this one out: I have never been accepted by a school at any level in my life. That includes undergrad, undergrad transfer, MA, MFA, and PhD. I dare anyone to beat that. If only I had ever applied to a prep school for the full sweep. I got my undergrad degree from a school with "modified open enrollment." I don't even know what that means.

To be frank, I don't give a fuck how busy they are. It's their job. The admissions committee is not the most important thing in their life, but it is the most important thing currently in the lives of everyone who applied. Professional courtesy, at least. Just about every single one of these departments are god awful at communicating anything unless they are absolutely sure you are in and reasonably sure that you are going to accept. There are departments I never heard back from at all last year.

not to give you nightmares, but there were schools I quite literally never heard back from last year.

So what is the deal with the two posted Irvine acceptances? Two seems like not very many. I am officially running out of options if these are real.

life, or something specific?

poet don't laugh. ok, laugh. editor makes sense. maybe one of those terrible people who reviews books. traveling lecturer/book promoter telling people about why they shouldn't get a PhD, which is something of a burgeoning cottage industry. get addicted to heroin in an effort to subsequently shake the addiction and get a job as a drug addiction counselor. professional tourist. kickerstarter huckster. pornography. and, as a last resort: english professor. wait.

I don't know that this is a general conclusion, but I do feel that it certainly pertains to people applying to PhD programs. AA decisions are only going to get you into a PhD program if you are otherwise qualified, and if you are otherwise qualified for a PhD program you have put yourself on the same level as everyone else with a realistic chance of being admitted. It should also be said that I think most minority PhD applicants do not come from poor areas or poor families, which already significantly levels the field. The AA recognizes a problem that it cannot fix: it is present because institutions recognize that it is inherently difficult for certain people to reach certain levels of achievement given uncontrollable circumstances, but those realities make it unlikely that those truly affected will have the opportunity to take advantage of the program. Tyrelle from the hood (to borrow from another thread) ain't getting a PhD, I don't care how brilliant he is. In that sense, the AA program may do some harm by glossing over the reality.

it is in sentences like this that I understand my relatively nontraditional background. I like the implication that "only" having two friends applying "this year" is supposed to be some sort of aberration. I am 29 and the majority of my friends do not have undergrad degrees of any sort, much less graduate aspirations. And no, I don't talk about it.

more or less. I wrote a paper sort of about that once (on Absalom, Absalom!). it was pretty bad.

based on the kinds of scholarship the discipline currently favors, you could rationally argue for this.

My whole point is that this is manifestly not true, and that this mindset is used to control you. It is even an assertion of power, as it is used to distance you from "real poor people," who are almost entirely defined by race, education level, and the wealth of their parents. It reinforces a shrinking distance, because without that distance you have to face uncomfortable realities. "Recognizing your privilege over them" is just educated talk for establishing yourself as not them, which is largely an exercise in vanity. And, lo and behold, those who hold the chips are more than happy to appeal to your (or anyone's) vanity. Turn on the TV and time how long it takes for someone to tell you how awesome you are. And for the record, I think bluecheese and I are arguing a lot of the same points in regards to the expression of education and academic knowledge.

Those are not "backup plans" for PhD students, they are alternatives. Could you have done those things? Maybe. But you didn't (and you likely think yourself superior for it). An MBA looks at your professional resume, of which you will have none after you get your PhD. A "professional school" is open to anyone with the money. You won't have the money. I like how you assume high school teaching is a fall back (analyze that privilege!). It's a different career path. Many school districts flat out will not hire people with PhDs, not (only) because they are not particularly qualified, but because teacher's unions frown upon the practice. With largely good reason. I'm sure you have an adjunct friend who makes 35k a year for 60 hour work weeks, no benefits, and no promise of continued employment. You can call that a privileged life if you would like, but even then that is not you. You will be making the NYU stipend before you can even dream of employment of any kind, and that stipend is not enough money to even live in the city in which your spectacularly wealthy institution is located. You will be working at least 60 hours a week, and the stipend is in all likelihood not even guaranteed for a long enough term to finish your dissertation, upon completion of which you will be guaranteed exactly nothing. If you are lucky you have seventeen years between the day you arrive at a PhD program and the day you become a tenured professor. And this is a salary you had to claw someone's face off in order to receive. Ok, it's slightly more than the janitor makes. Congratulations. And the sad part is I even envy you, because at this point I am closer to your father than to you. Do you know who isn't critical of the privilege they have? Corporate executives, investment bankers, corporate lawyers, lobbyists, senators, brokers. Yeah, you say, but they're all assholes. OK. They rule the world. What are you going to do about it? Direct your meager social capital at maintaining your own slight privilege through the illusion of analysis while they grind your face into the mud, or take that affected academic distance and point the gaze upwards? I get that there are differences between your father and the poor graduate student with no tenure position possible on the other side. And, to go further, between Tyrelle in the projects and either of those two people. But to emphasize those differences over the differences that rule and dictate them from above is too convenient and lazy. If there is anything your education nets you on a social scale, it is this ability to see the forest instead of the trees.

when your social classes are those of the capitalists, capitalism will dictate the parameters of membership. things like education, background, race, etc. are relics of the old system conveniently appropriated by the new one to divide the lower classes among themselves. to the system, your education is worth what it nets you. and that is increasingly a whole lot of nothing.